Aperture Magazine

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The Magazine of Photography and Ideas

Family

“The family photograph is a marker of myths,” Glen Helfand writes in Aperture’s Winter 2018 issue, “Family.” At a moment of conservative backlash to queer rights and of the separation of families at the U.S. border, the image of the family you have—or the family you choose in search of connections across race and sexuality—has never been more important. “Family” features essays by literary figures including Sheila Heti, Pico Iyer, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, as well as photography by Diana Markosian, whose family emigrated from Russia to California; Liz Johnson Artur, who has spent her career photographing individuals of the African diaspora; and a special portfolio by Stefan Ruiz of the House of Xtravaganza, one of New York’s legendary ballroom houses. Throughout “Family,” artists and photographers transform the group portrait through appropriation, performance, conceptual intervention, and long-term community engagement.

Back Issues

Aperture takes an in-depth look at the dynamic spaces that have shaped conversations about photography in Africa for the last twenty-five years—the biennials, experimental art spaces, and educational workshops in which artists and audiences interact with photography. “Platform Africa” presents a new generation of artists who have connected through such platforms as the Bamako Biennale in Mali and Addis Foto Fest in Ethiopia, and is produced in collaboration with guest editors Bisi Silva, founder and artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria; John Fleetwood, former head of Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop and current director of Photo, a new African initiative; and Aïcha Diallo, associate editor of Contemporary And.

The Winter edition of Aperture magazine is a landmark issue dedicated to the representation of transgender lives, communities, and histories in photography. Guest edited by Zackary Drucker, the artist, activist, and producer of the acclaimed television series Transparent, “Future Gender” considers how trans and gender-nonconforming individuals have used photography to imagine new expressions of social and personal identity, from the nineteenth century to today.

Most prisons and jails across the United States do not allow prisoners to have access to cameras. At a moment when 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the US, 3.8 million people are on probation, and 870,000 former prisoners are on parole, how can images tell the story of mass incarceration when the imprisoned don’t have control over their own representation? Organized with the scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, this issue of Aperture magazine addresses the unique role photography plays in creating a visual record of a national crisis.